


The Breathings of Your Heart

by glittercracker



Category: No. 6 - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Fluff, Happy Ending, Lack of Communication, M/M, Reunion Fic, do not copy to another site, nod to Violet Evergarden
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-28 23:37:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17192363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glittercracker/pseuds/glittercracker
Summary: Shion decides that two years is long enough to wait for Nezumi, and goes to give him a piece of his mind. Though not quite in the way that either might have planned."Shion’s violet eyes met Nezumi’s in a long, hard stare. Nezumi shuddered despite himself. This was not the boy he’d left behind two years previous. This was a man, one he no longer knew, and one who had every right to demand payback. Nezumi wanted to say his name; he couldn’t make his lips move to form the word."





	The Breathings of Your Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OvaltineAuthoress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OvaltineAuthoress/gifts).



> This is my No. 6 gift exchange present to ovaltineauthoress. It's not exactly a Christmassy setting , but forgiveness and love always work for the holidays, I think? Oh and if you are getting Violet Evergarden vibes from this, it's bc I watched it right before writing it. When I got the prompt "communication" how could I not?? Thank you, thank you to akumeoi for being the best of betas!

_ “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” _

 

  * __William Wordsworth__



 

 

Nezumi didn’t look up from his keyboard as the door to his small office opened, concentrating as he typed rapidly. 

 

“Sir, your 4:30 client is waiting.”

 

“Sure, almost done,” Nezumi said, glancing quickly over the text on his computer screen and then pushing “print.” It had been a bitch of a letter to write, a father trying to convince his wayward son, yet again, to come home and join the No. 2 council and lead the life of a fat sycophant. Nezumi didn’t blame the kid for the constant refusals. He resented writing the letters, but then again, writing them, and others like them, was what kept him fed and housed in between acting gigs. Fed and housed rather nicely, truth be told, so he really couldn’t complain.

 

“Let him in,” he said absently to the secretary, re-reading the last sentence of the letter one more time. Even as the printer whirred, he wasn’t convinced that it was quite right. Too flowery? Certainly too much influenced by the book he’d just finished reading – something southern, with language that was both overwrought and beautiful, and far too full of symbolism.

 

“Of course,” the secretary said. “Sir?”

 

Thinking that the secretary was speaking to him, Nezumi looked up expectantly from the printer basket from which he was retrieving the letter; and then he froze. The man had not been speaking to him. He had been speaking to the client he was showing in, a young man in a long, dark trench coat, with a shock of silvery hair. As he shucked the coat into the waiting arms of the secretary his face became visible, though still, he did not look at Nezumi. It didn’t matter. Nezumi would have known him anywhere, if only for the crimson stain that ran from his left cheek to his neck and under the collar of his immaculate, white, button-up shirt. 

 

The resemblance to his old friend ended there. Both face and form were longer, leaner; he wasn’t certain that he would best the other man in height, anymore. There was also a long, fine scar slicing through the one the parasite had left; and there were others. Smaller, but numerous. Nezumi felt them like a punch to the gut.

 

Shion’s violet eyes met Nezumi’s in a long, hard stare. Nezumi shuddered despite himself. This was not the boy he’d left behind two years previous. This was a man, one he no longer knew, and one who had every right to demand payback. Nezumi wanted to say his name; he couldn’t make his lips move to form the word.

 

The secretary, of course, was ready to absolve them both of the overdue greeting. “Mr. Shion asked specifically for your services in writing a letter,” the man said, a warmth in his tone that told Nezumi that Shion had not lost his old charm, for all his new aloofness. He could not bring himself to consider that the aloofness was purely a function of meeting Nezumi again.

 

“Of – of course,” Nezumi said, opening a new file on the computer. “Sh – Sir,” he corrected quickly at the hard flash of Shion’s eyes on his own, “would you care for refreshments before we – ”

 

“No,” Shion said, the once-warm timbre of his voice chilled and hardened, like tree sap in winter. “Let’s get right to it.”

 

“Okay,” Nezumi said, flicking a glance at Shion’s cold face and then nodding to the secretary that it was all right to leave them. He turned back to his computer screen, opening a new file. “Would you care to sit?” 

 

Shion considered the chair in front of the desk for a moment, and then sat, though nothing about his posture relaxed.

 

“To whom would you like to address your letter?” Nezumi asked, trying to force his voice to even politeness, though it was straining to leap and tatter like a flag held against a gale.

 

“Mao Fumei,” Shion said evenly.

 

Nezumi faltered at that, turned shocked eyes upward. Shion’s own eyes were like damsons frosted in an early cold snap. “Shion – how did you know my – ”

 

“I’ve engaged you to write a letter,” Shion answered calmly. “If you can’t do it, I’ll find someone else.”

 

Nezumi bent his head, unable to hold those eyes. Though it might lie beneath a layer of frost, there was emotion swarming in them, too much for him to face. “Okay. So, you’d like to address it to…to…”

 

“Mao Fumei,” Shion repeated, his voice soft in that it was not abrasive, but it was still, somehow, sharp. As if he knew what that name meant to Nezumi. Because, of course, he did. How couldn’t he? But how on this blasted earth had he ever uncovered it?

 

Nezumi began to type, relying on muscle memory alone, because that name had paralyzed his mind. “Dear Mr. Mao,” he said as he typed, and then waited, expectantly, staring at the blinking cursor. There was a long silence. Too long. At last he looked up: those wide, purple eyes were fixed on him, unblinking. The skin of the other man’s face was snowy, aside from the brilliant scar. He could have been a wax replica of the boy Nezumi had known through that brief and endless winter; the boy whom he’d – 

 

“Over the two years of our separation,” Shion said, cutting Nezumi’s thoughts brutally short, “I’ve had a good deal of opportunity to consider what I would like to say to you, should we ever meet again.”

 

A long moment passed before Nezumi realized that Shion was dictating. The screen and keyboard swam in front of his eyes as he comprehended what was happening – or did he? Was Shion really capable of something so calculating? Not the Shion he’d left; but this was not the Shion he’d left, and because he had no one but himself to blame for that, he began to type, though the words sickened him.

 

“It was a beautiful day when you walked away from me. Far, far too beautiful for the grief that leaving caused. You had your reasons, Mr. Mao. I do understand that. Your life had been a misery, and the city we had leveled together was the architect of that. No sane person would choose to stay there.”

 

Shion paused; his eyes focused on the window and the springtime trees budding beyond in audacious, acid green. Nezumi stole the moment to look at him: still beautiful. No, that was wrong. He was now far, far more beautiful than the soft boy of two years previous. More beautiful than the maddened one who had killed a man to save Nezumi and then turned the gun on himself. He might have lost his softness, but the sinew and bone he was made of now were like the taut stone of sculpture. There was an unforgiving cast to the set of his jaw that told Nezumi, even beyond the scars, that he had faced hardship they had never anticipated in the wake of the city’s fall, and he had overcome it by force of will. But his lips were full and his eyes were deep and dear lord, how had Nezumi ever walked away from – 

 

“But,” Shion continued, his eyes snapping back to Nezumi’s face. It took him a moment to resume typing. “But I don’t think that those months we spent together were miserable. They weren’t miserable for me, even though I’d lost so much. And I don’t think they were miserable for you, either. How long had it been, Mr. Mao, since you’d had someone to talk to, to argue with – to dance with?” 

 

For the first time, there was a chink in Shion’s armored voice; tiny, such a little thing, but Nezumi’s fine ear caught it. His fingers halted over the keys.

 

“How long had it been since you were warm?” Shion’s voice was lower now. “Since someone held you at night? Since someone cared whether or not you were breathing? Since someone fit their own breaths to yours, so that you were like one person in two bodies? How long…”

 

There was a pause; Nezumi realized that he hadn’t typed any of what Shion had just said, and he rushed to catch up, although his fingers shook as the words formed beneath them. As they flowed forth, there was a slow wrench of something inside of him shifting; tearing.

 

“How long did you mean to let that mean nothing to you? To let all of it mean nothing?”

 

The words were a brush above a whisper, and when Nezumi finally looked up, Shion’s head was bent and tears were falling into his lap. They glinted gold in the shattered late-afternoon light that filtered through the tree branches.

 

“Shion,” he said softly. The other man only bent his head farther, wept harder. “Shion, come here. Please?”

 

There was a long moment when Nezumi didn’t know whether he would do it; whether he had even heard him. And then the white-haired man swept a hand across his face, looked Nezumi in the eye with his own, wet, bruised ones, and said, “Why should I?”

 

Nezumi sighed, shook his head. “You shouldn’t. There is absolutely no reason why you should.” And then he stood up, and rounded the desk until he stood in front of Shion. He offered him shaking hands. “But please. Please…”

 

Shion looked at the extended hands for a long moment, and then, reluctantly, he took them in his own. A sob rose in Nezumi’s throat at their warmth; at their hardness. They were covered now with callouses to go with the scars he’d noticed; what had Shion been through in the years he’d been gone? Far worse that he had, that was certain. He tugged gently on Shion’s hands, urging him to his feet. Shion looked up at him, his eyes swarming, questioning. 

 

“Please,” Nezumi said again.

 

Shion stood, still holding his hands. They were eye-level now; no height difference separated them; no material distance, and yet such a wide, black sea of pain. 

 

“Why did you come here?” Nezumi asked, his eyes hard on Shion’s.

 

Shion didn’t flinch, though the old Shion would have. “Because I needed to know.”

 

“Know what?”

 

“Whether you ever really meant to come back.”

 

Nezumi looked into the other man’s eyes, saw the wells of doubt. Knew that he had dug them. He sighed. “Yes. I did.”

 

“When?” Shion asked.

 

“When I thought you would have forgiven me.”

 

Shion laughed bitterly. “And you would know that, how? For that matter, how did you know that I hadn’t already? That I didn’t forgive you the moment you walked away?”

 

Nezumi shook his head, and laughed a little. “I meant to send you a letter.”

 

Shion narrowed his eyes. “But where would you send it? You didn’t know that anything in No. 6 would stay the same, not even my mum’s bakery.”

 

“Well, exactly.”

 

“So?”

 

Nezumi sighed, let go of Shion’s hands and then rounded again to the computer. He opened a file he’d kept on his desktop for the better part of a year, and pushed “print.” He waited until the pages had filled the basket, and then he withdrew them, handing them to the waiting Shion, who began to read.

 

He didn’t even turn the first page before he asked, “When did you write this?”

 

Nezumi turned his eyes away. “Every day. Every single day that I was away from you, beginning with the first, I added to it.”

 

At that, Shion crushed the pages in his hands and leaned into Nezumi. “Why?  _ Why  _ didn’t you just come back? Or if you couldn’t do that, why not come get me and take me with you?”

 

There was wetness on Nezumi’s cheeks, shocking as a blow. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried. “Because I didn’t think you’d want me, anymore.” The words were so low, he didn’t know whether he’d actually spoken them. But when Shion’s arms came around him, tight and certain, he knew that he had. 

 

It let loose then: everything he’d kept inside himself for so long. The black skeleton of a house engulfed in flames, accompanied by a baby’s screams and a woman’s calling, “Run, Fumei! Run!” Bitter days in a cold place with an old woman’s colder admonitions never to love, never to strive, never to speak his own name. Crime to survive, capture, flight, pain, blood – and then, the kind of warmth he’d almost forgotten existed. Shion’s body next to his in a child’s bed, a whisper of that which had once been his for the taking. And Shion again: out of nowhere, a living body beside his, someone who didn’t want him to die. The soft and steely heart of someone who loved him. Who loved  _ him,  _ when he’d come to believe himself unlovable. 

 

“I’ll want you forever, Nezumi,” Shion said. And then, carefully, “Fumei. I’ll always want you. And that’s what I came to tell you, because I thought that if you wrote it, if you saw the words, if you could touch them, you might believe them.”

 

Nezumi could only bend his head and weep into Shion’s shoulder, while Shion stroked his back. When his tears finally subsided into shuddering breaths, Shion pushed him to arms’ length. “The question,” he said, a little of the hardness returning, “is whether you want me.”

 

Nezumi looked at the pale, beautiful face in front of his: earnest eyes, parted lips, tremulous with the need for the right answer, no matter how strong he’d grown in their time apart. He brushed the silver hair back from Shion’s face, ran a thumb along the scar on his cheek, smiling to himself at the hitch in Shion’s breathing. It was still just as sensitive as it had been years ago.

 

But now, well; now those two years’ worth of words needed to be spoken. “Shion,” Nezumi said, unable to resist brushing the scar again, or the shudder that ran through his old friend at the touch, “don’t you realize that I’ve always wanted you? I wanted you so much, I didn’t know what to do with it.” He lowered his eyes as Shion’s widened. “I thought that I would destroy you with wanting you. That’s why I left you, because I never learned the right way to love…but still, I’ve loved you since you stood on the balcony of a posh house, screaming into a hurricane.”

 

Shion uttered a choke of laughter. “I was an idiot. But you were an idiot, too: taking me in, when you had nothing, and I could only be dead weight.”

 

Nezumi dropped his head again to Shion’s shoulder, his cheek pressed to Shion’s neck. Dear gods, the skin was so soft, the pulse beating so fast. He couldn’t resist pressing his lips to that flutter; Shion let out a sigh, and then leaned into it. 

 

“So, we’re both idiots,” Nezumi breathed against his skin. “But I’m not enough of an idiot that I’d leave you again. If,” he pulled away, looked into Shion’s shining eyes, “only if that’s what you want.”

 

“Fumei,” Shion said, his voice low and soft.

 

“Yes?” Nezumi answered, struggling to keep his voice even. If Shion rejected him now, he didn’t think he would ever recover.

 

“Can you cancel the rest of your clients for the day? We have a letter to finish.”

 

Nezumi raised his eyebrows. “Really? You want to sit here and write a letter?”

 

One side of Shion’s mouth quirked up; his eyes glinted. “I never said we had to do it here.”

 

Nezumi smiled, maybe as widely as he had in his entire life, and tightened his arms around Shion. “Consider it done, Your Majesty.”


End file.
